Intel Arc A370M vs AMD Radeon RX 550 (Laptop) vs AMD Radeon RX 580 (Laptop)

Intel Arc A370M

The Intel Arc A370M is a dedicated mobile entry level graphics card for laptops based on Xe HPG microarchitecture. It uses the ACM-G11 chip and offers all 8 Xe-cores (128 ALUs), 8 ray tracing units and a 64-bit memory bus for 4 GB GDDR6 graphics memory. The chip integrates 7.2 billion transistors and the die measures 157 mm2.

The performance is in the entry level of dedicated graphics cards for laptops in 2022. AMD did publish some gaming benchmarks with medium settings in 5 games that showed that the Radeon RX 6500M is clearly faster. Intel only compared the A370M (with a faster CPU) to the slower Iris iGPU in the i7-1280P (see below). Thanks to the additional 2 cores and higher clock speeds, the entry level Arc A350M should be clearly left behind.

The chip also integrates two media engines for VP9, AVC, HEVC, and AV1 8k en- and decoding. The 4 display pipes support up to 4x 4k120 HDR via DMI 2.0B or DisplayPort 2.0 10G. 

The A370M is produced in 6nm at TSMC (N6 process) and supports dynamic power share (using Deep Link) with 12th gen Intel CPUs (Alder Lake).

AMD Radeon RX 550 (Laptop)

The AMD Radeon RX 550 is mobile mid-range graphics card for laptops based on the Polaris 12 chip . It is manufactured in an improved 14 nm FinFET process at Globalfoundries or Samsung. The Polaris 12 chip (codename Lexa) is a smaller chip than the Polaris 11 and 21 and uses the improved 14nm process that allows higher clock rates than the first generation (Radeon RX 400 series). It features 640 shaders (10 CUs) and (at least in the Pavilion 15t) all cores are activated in the mobile version (where 512 are activated in the desktop RX 550).

According to the specified peak performance, the chip should be similar fast as a Radeon Pro 455 in the MacBook Pro 2016. In our tests it reaches the Radeon Pro 455 and bests the Nvidia GeForce MX150, but stays behind the GeForce GTX 1050.

The features of the Radeon RX 550 are identical to the faster RX 460 and all other Polaris chips. See more details on the Polaris architecture here.

The power envelope of the faster Radeon Pro 460 is rated at 35 Watt according to the AMD blog post. In our tests with The Witcher 3, the GPU needed in the Pavilion 15t 80 Watt and positiones itself between the much more power efficient MX150 and the GTX 1050.

AMD Radeon RX 580 (Laptop)

The AMD Radeon RX 580 is a high-end graphics card for laptops. It is based on the Polaris 20 chip. Compared to the Polaris 10 in the similar RX 480, the Polaris 20 is manufacted in an improved 14nm process (LPP+) for higher clock speeds and some power efficiency improvements in idle. The performance in laptops depends on the used clock speeds and should be similar to the desktop RX 470 (see for gaming benchmarks) or even RX 480.

More information on the Polaris architecture and its features can be found here.